From the Editor: June 2005 - Other People's Problems

Peer production is only the beginning. Today, the best software maintenance is part salesmanship.

As long as there has been software, we've been
facing the “buy or build” decision.
But “build” became a last resort as
packaged proprietary software offered better value.
Today there's a third option, free and
open-source software, or what Yochai Benkler called
“commons-based peer production” in his paper “Coase's
Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm”.

Cooperating on software development is great,
but most of the cost of software is maintenance.
If you've been using Linux for a while, you probably
have in-house versions of software that don't
match the mainstream versions, and you're stuck
maintaining it. Just as you
have the “buy, build or peer-produce” decision,
you have a decision to make about
maintenance of code you'll need in the future.
Maintain it yourself, sell a free
software project on maintaining it or work with a
support vendor—who probably will try to sell it
to a project themselves.

Except for the little bit that gets value from being
secret—the formula that decides which households
receive a credit card offer, or the algorithm for
making the aliens in the game
attack you in a suitably compelling way—code is
better and cheaper if you get someone else
to maintain it for you.
The ideal is to get an ongoing free software project
to decide to do things your way. Glen Martin
of open-source support
company SpikeSource says they'll support fixes they
make for customers as long as necessary, but “We
don't want to continue maintaining them.” That means
part of the business is selling changes to project maintainers.

Red Hat's Tim Burke makes the same point on page 70.
Red Hat now makes it a priority to get kernel patches
into the main tree, contentious as the process
can be.
If you don't want to use your powers of persuasion to
manipulate the software ecosystem, some vendors will
tell you to drop open source, give up control and
just do it their way. But somewhere in the middle,
between spending all your time playing open-source
politics and giving up entirely, is the approach
that's working for more and more companies. You might
be happy with Red Hat's kernel, but get involved in
Web reporting software yourself, for example.

Free databases are taking the same steps into
business-critical roles that Linux did
last century. Ludovic Marcotte has a promising
answer to the database clustering problem
that beats switching to a proprietary database
or hacking up something that just works for your
application. Get started with database replication
on page 52.

ATA over Ethernet (AoE)
storage hit the market recently, and when we saw the
new driver in the kernel, we got Ed Cashin to
explain how it. AoE goes with logical volume
management like cookies and milk, as you'll see on
page 24.

Selling projects on maintaining your code for you is
such a powerful lever that we can expect to see more
persuasion and sales skills included in future developer
training. Whether you're buying,
building or getting someone else to do it for you,
enjoy the issue.

As Linux continues to play an ever increasing role in corporate data centers and institutions, ensuring the integrity and protection of these systems must be a priority. With 60% of the world's websites and an increasing share of organization's mission-critical workloads running on Linux, failing to stop malware and other advanced threats on Linux can increasingly impact an organization's reputation and bottom line.

Most companies incorporate backup procedures for critical data, which can be restored quickly if a loss occurs. However, fewer companies are prepared for catastrophic system failures, in which they lose all data, the entire operating system, applications, settings, patches and more, reducing their system(s) to “bare metal.” After all, before data can be restored to a system, there must be a system to restore it to.

In this one hour webinar, learn how to enhance your existing backup strategies for better disaster recovery preparedness using Storix System Backup Administrator (SBAdmin), a highly flexible bare-metal recovery solution for UNIX and Linux systems.